That’s entertainment.

Jenn Lodge has had a picture of Dr. Fauci as her phone’s wallpaper for over a year. When she saw him give his first Congressional testimony last March, she was thrilled that a grown-up might be in charge of the COVID response. The pic is kind of a glamour shot of the good doctor — or “Tony,” as she calls him. I’ve seen Jenn lock her iPhone just to be able to slide her finger across his chest and open the thing up again.

And when Dr. Fauci said it was okay for fully vaccinated people like herself to mix indoors with an unvaccinated household, Jenn had me on the phone to book herself in for a visit chez Carr. (As I write, Al and I are three days away from Jab No. 2.) It came as zero surprise to me that Jenn had found a way to make sure she had a jab in her arm before anyone else our age seemed to be eligible. Just like she has A Guy for elegant, non-weedy tasting cannabis truffles, and A Guy who (in the Before Times) could get her backstage at nearly any gig she wanted, she has A Guy whose cousin Marty is a Beverly Hills physician who could hold back a dose or two of Moderna for her.

I hadn’t welcomed another human being who wasn’t Alex or the washing machine repair guy or my mom (who was over here even faster than Jenn once the CDC gave the thumbs up) into my home since… when? I think it must have been Caitlin, who had breezed into town on the hunt for a house in the Valley, back at the end of February. February 2020, that is. Another country, it feels like sometimes.

I’d always prided myself on my hospitality back in Pasadena. Having a housekeeper to work with meant I could spend more time on thinking through the details of how we’d dress the room and what we’d serve our guests (I tried to be seasonal in both of these), and less on the busywork of laying out the silverware and vacuuming the house. More setting the stage rather than dressing it, so to speak.

Before he even arrived in the States, Julian had tasked me with finding a housekeeper to run our big new home. I resisted. How difficult could it be taking care of a place that only had two people living there? A gardener, of course — everyone had a gardener who came by once a week to trim the hedges and prune the trees — but it wasn’t like I was exactly inexperienced at taking care of myself. I’d been in the apartment on Raymond for almost two years by then, and lived on my own in the dinky third floor studio in Providence that Julian had visited and praised for its tidiness. Of course it was tidy — do you think I wouldn’t make sure it was near perfection before I let his foot graze my threshold?

“And I took care of the Palace on the Hill with Minty for six months, since you seem to forget,” I’d said to Julian with a sniff at the time. “Everyone said how homey and welcoming it was, even you.”

(I deftly elided over how my contribution to homekeeping at the Palace was limited to wiping down countertops and runs to the off license.)

About six weeks before his visa interview, Julian had flown in from London to make sure we were on track to close on the house in the time frame that his accountant said would work best for his UK taxes that year. (I’m still not completely sure that was true.) The first thing he did upon arrival — after ravishing me for a couple of hours on my soon to be disposed of double bed — was pull a stack of resumes out of his briefcase. I was still in a blissed-out refractory period when he tossed them on my bare chest, with an order to pick a woman I liked.

“I don’t need help,” I insisted, carefully moving the binder clip of papers to one side. (That clip stung when it grazed my nipple, but I said nothing.) “I can manage on my own, but thank you.”

“Pah!” Jules barked. “How will you manage a cocktail party for a hundred people?”

“It can’t be that hard,” I mumbled, throwing my legs over the side of the bed, and started pulling on and buttoning up the dress shirt he’d practically ripped off when we’d walked through the door of my apartment.

“Mel,” he said, more softly. He smoothed my mussed up hair and patted my cheek. “You can’t just microwave some… what do you call those things that are like savory pies? Your friend Sean served them at that horrible party you dragged me to last March.”

I ransacked my memory hole — Sean’s party had started at his apartment in Culver City and ended up at the Backstage Bar, which is precisely where my recollection of that evening ended. (Most of my evenings involving the Backstage Bar incorporate an early termination of consciousness.)

Then it came to me in a flash of congealing ham and cheese. “Do you mean Hot Pockets?”

Julian had poked at one on a paper plate with a look of grim fascination, but had ultimately passed in favor of noshing from the tubs the olives I’d brought from the Bristol Farms in South Pasadena. (It’s astonishingly easy to spend $100 on olives at Bristol Farms.)

“It was,” Julian said, unbuttoning several of the buttons I’d just secured, “neither hot nor a pocket.”

I couldn’t disagree with that analysis.

“Look at it this way,” Julian continued. “I’m doing this for you as much as me. The fun part of entertaining is the food, the wine, the conversation. The utterly boring part is the mechanics of it all. Cleaning, cooking –“

“But you like my cooking!”

“I adore your cooking, darling,” Julian assured me with a condescending pat on the crown of my head, like I’d been a very good Pekinese. “Night and day between now and London.”

Although I had been achingly lonely so much of my time living in the UK as Julian’s quasi-fiancee, there had been solace in learning how to cook. The precision of it all — scales and cups and spoons for measurement, nesting bowls in glazed oat brown stone that popped so neatly into each other, recipes that commanded respect for ingredients and quantities — appealed to me at a moment when very little else snapped into precise view.

Not that I was inept in the kitchen before. Unlike my sister, I’d taken my job as cooking dogsbody to my parents fairly seriously growing up. Yet another way to be useful to Mommy and Daddy, of course, and thereby deserving of their love. But I’d been slapdash at times, mismeasuring the flour or adding too much salt or forgetting some necessary element and hoping it would work out all right anyway. (It didn’t always.)

When I started moaning about how bored I was at one of our depressingly regular lunches at the Harvey Nicks’ restaurant, Jocasta suggested I take up cookery as a hobby. “While it’s not strictly necessary for a woman to cook these days, it is a talent most men appreciate. I’ll have Trudy order some Delia Smith books and a set of Le Creuset for you.”

It was a moment of perspicacity and kindness quite unlike her. In hindsight, it does make sense. Earlier that morning, her Harley Street Dr. Feelgood had tweaked her meds and given the large glass of pinot gris she’d worked through (to the exclusion of the delicious John Dory we’d both ordered), I think she was probably speaking to me from an alternate universe.

Though difficult for me to admit, Jocasta Cranford had been right about the Delia, the Le Creuset, and her son’s appreciation for my expanded talents. While Julian spent his days in the City as a master of the universe in training, I applied myself to mastering a perfect leek and cheese souffle (learned the hard way not to open the oven early) and wobbly custard tarts and a fast roast chicken I still make without even pausing to recall the temperatures at which to roast, or how many minutes per pound. (It truly is excellent, I highly recommend you look it up.)

Jules was patient with the flops, to his credit. “It does have some redeeming bits,” he’d say, picking his way through charred rice to get to the still succulent morsels of fish in the bright yellow kedgeree I’d presented him with. Or, “Crackling is overrated,” when the pork roast came out with a salty, flabby layer of fat rather than the crisp and meaty rind I knew he adored. These earnest announcements invariably made me crack up, which made him crack up in turn, and an evening of awful food was transformed into something that knit us even closer. (We were so in love then, so in love and so very, very young.)

I wasn’t to have a chance to show company quite how far I’d come along with crackling, though. (Not that it was so terribly easy to find the right cuts of meat in the US to make it in the first place.) The new house on Madison would have a housekeeper, even if I could run it on my own (and I probably could have), because Julian said it would. Staff were a mark of being too busy or refined or otherwise engaged with life to bear such trivialities as rotating groceries in the pantry or scrubbing sinks with Bon Ami. Most importantly, staff meant you could afford staff in the first place. And we certainly could.

Rianne wasn’t the first person I interviewed, or the second, or even the eighth. I had an excuse for rejecting each one: wanted to be my friend; wanted to be my mom; talked about crystals; talked about crystals and how the numerological aspect of the house number was, like, really good luck; too much turquoise jewelry; didn’t smile once in 40 minutes; Bostonian accent; new to LA and way, way prettier than me (thus likely to snare a sugar daddy in short order, or Julian if I wasn’t careful); put three packets of Splenda in her mocha latte.

As my refusals grew more picayune in their reasoning, Julian became even more insistent that I just choose someone. “She doesn’t have to be Mary fucking Poppins, Liss. You have the job description my mother drew up. If she can scrub a toilet and spatchcock a chicken she’ll do.”

He sounded particularly snappish that day, even for him. His visa interview was the following day, and although we had nothing to worry about — if you’ve ever watched 90 Day Fiance you know the bar is low for proving a bona fide relationship for a K1 visa — he was worried. Frankly, I was worried, too. Julian’s tolerance level for bureaucrats in any country is notoriously sub-sub-basement low, and the stakes for the interview were pretty high. To be fair, he usually got his way, even with the most intractable civil servants. I once saw him cow a DMV worker — hardly an occupation for scraping toadies — into taking his license picture seven times until his picture was just right. (It was a particularly good pic though.)

By the time he called with the news he’d been approved by the consulate, I’d hired Rianne. I’d passed over her a few times in the stack, primarily because I wasn’t sure she was in the country legally. Her early schooling had been in Ireland, followed by work in Berlin as a nanny and then as a maid in a great country house in the English countryside and finally as a daily housekeeper in Beverly Hills for the two years prior. Nothing spoke to a family connection to the States, or a visa of any kind. With Julian’s impending arrival on a visa of his own, he and I had agreed: anyone we hired directly had to have their own papers in order.

I called her anyway. Over the phone, there was no missing her Irish accent, so it didn’t seem impolite to press when she met me at Pie’n Burger for lunch before a tour of the new house.

“I’m legal, if that’s what you’re after,” she said with a bright laugh, and stuffed another bite of cherry pie between her bright red lips. “But if you must know, I’m from Tralee. Me mam’s American, and so am I, through her.”

The slice of lemon meringue in front of me was untouched — my wedding was a scant six weeks away, and the dress skimmed over my hips. There wasn’t room for an extra wisp of meringue passing over my lips. “My friend Cait’s dad is from Ireland,” I offered, as if it meant anything. “But from Galway. Not very nearby.”

“Pah. Ireland is Ireland, we’re likely related. You look like you might be my cousin too, with that coloring.”

I nodded, and tried not to think about how scrumptious the lemon curd of the pie might taste spreading over my tongue. “My mom’s family is from Dingle and Dublin.”

Rianne stopped mid-bite and rested her fork politely, tines down, on the side of the sturdy green and white crockery plate. “Dingle? We probably are cousins. So! Tell me about this grand house of yours and what needs doing there. If you’re worried about references, I’ve heaps of them. Mostly good, but I wouldn’t recommend you call my clarinet teacher back home.”

Choosing Rianne hadn’t been terribly difficult in the end. When pulled up to the big house on Madison, she slid her knockoff Ray-Bans down her nose and let free a low whistle. “That’s lovely, that is, Ms. de Mornay. Perfectly sized for me.”

“It’s Mel,” I stressed, for the fourth time that day to her. “I’m younger than you. It feels… weird.”

“I’ll try. Mrs. Rafizadeh would have kittens if I called her Margie, but she’s old enough to be my gran so there you have it.” Rianne rubbed her hands in gleefully abandoned anticipation, in much the same way I’ve seen Alex approach a particularly thorny math problem, or my sister in Neiman Marcus with someone else’s credit card. “Shall I have a peek?”

When we reached the kitchen, I already knew Rianne was even more suited to the house than I was. “Grand, grand,” she repeated, poking her head into empty cabinets and closets, pulling a tape measure out of her canvas satchel and sizing up where she might place the furniture I told her I needed to buy. “Just what I love, a great big banger of a challenge.”

In the nearly seven years I lived in the house on Madison, Rianne never disappointed. When I needed her advice on decorating, she steered me towards a careful balance between Julian’s tastes and mine. Flowers, everywhere, in every room she could place them, spilling from bowls and vases and pitchers and one of the brilliant blue cylinders from Cora’s studio. It had been Rianne who’d helped me find the other help we needed — Carlos for the remodeling and bigger structural work, Benito and his son for the garden, Lupe and Consuelo for passing hors d’oeuvres at cocktail parties and helping Rianne plate meals. Each of them dependable and easygoing, much like Rianne herself.

And crucially, like Rianne, every member of our staff excelled at following my lead: nothing is wrong between my husband and me. Or, Julian had a hard day. Or, he doesn’t mean it when he says it like that, we always make up. Or, most frequently, everything is fine, why do you ask?

Julian sacked Rianne about two weeks after he threw a small bag in the back of the convertible and drove south towards downtown LA, ranting about how he’d loved Alex and me too much to believe what he knew had to be true. Not that Rianne had had much to do once the dinner parties stopped, the cosy games nights with Geddeses were no more, no burrata and heirloom tomato bruschettas to prepare or vats of moules marinière to simmer on the vast Viking range.

I wanted her to stay, to turn her gifts of efficiency and good cheer and friendly competence to me, like she did to any task I set her. Without Julian, I was a scrambled pile of feelings, most of them ragged and bursting with brackish tears. Rianne can fix it, I promised myself. She knows how it got as fucked as it did, and she can help me unfuck it, no? She’d been the one who’d discreetly passed me proof of Julian’s infidelities for years, even if I chose to ignore them, or tuck them away to consider if I felt like a little casual masochism. She’d heard the screaming and the weeping, surely, through the oak door of Julian’s study or passing by the living room after our guests had left for the night, after Jules and I had both filled ourselves to the brim with red wine and resentment. After all that, surely Rianne could stay.

Jules wouldn’t allow that. He paid her four months’ salary to go away and stay there, and got her set up in a new position in La Jolla where she’d have her own suite of rooms on the grounds of the estate. She was very, very sorry, she promised me. So sorry to leave me when I was brittle, when I was shattering every day, but she had to look out for herself, too.

“I can’t look that kind of gift horse in the mouth, Mel,” she told me as she packed up the knick-knacks she’d kept in her small study, the one that should have been a nursery. “There’s just not much for me to do here now, and forgive me, but I have always made it a rule not to be involved in my employers’ lives.”

It had been one of the reasons I’d trusted her to begin with, and now the professional distance always slotted between us had opened wide enough for me to fall inside.

“It’s all money at the end of the day, and everyone has a price,” Julian had said to me so many times. “You’d be surprised how easily people are bought and sold, even the ones you think are too noble.”

Alex was on that list, along with Rianne. Julian had bought him off so many times, to leave me alone, to be kinder to me, to give Julian greater leverage within the family by stitching up every little Carr calamity with a needle and dosh. And Al had put aside whatever life he wanted to marry a woman he wasn’t (yet) in love with to keep a sagging Balcraigie from folding in on itself, like a Hallowe’en jack-o-lantern left to rot on the front porch well into November.

With Rianne, my dignity, and nearly all my financial resources gone, I rediscovered my own housekeeping skills. There were the sheets I cried into and sloshed wine over every night to wash, for one. Julian still paid for Benito to keep the garden up — if the house was to be sold, it wouldn’t do to have a jungle of dandelions and overgrown rose bushes — but I tended and picked the vegetables I’d sown in a sunny, south-facing spot. I kept the sensible Mercedes GLE in the driveway clean of pollen with a hand wash and polish each week, even if I couldn’t afford the gasoline to drive it.

Food was rarely an issue. I just didn’t eat it, so I wasted little thought or money on what to prepare. It’s amazing how grief and despair can crowd out hunger in your belly, but leave just enough room to pour as much liquor as you need in there.

With quite a deal of prodding, Alex eventually lured me out of the dankness of my slough of despond. Trip after trip, every few weeks he’d appear at the mint green door of our house — Julian’s house, really, though my name was also on the title — and pass over the threshold only to drag me back over it.

“This house isn’t for us, sweetest,” he’d say, and sweep me into an Uber headed for the Standard or the Beverly Hilton to be away from a place where he couldn’t help but see Julian’s mark in nearly every corner. He took to calling the house Chernobyl, which I thought was rather rude, but apt. There had been a catastrophic disaster there, a disaster born of lies and denial by those in control of the place in the first place, while they pretended that inside all was well, simply marvelous, nothing to see here.

By the time we got to Santa Monica, after two years of keeping house for myself, entertaining on my own, the thought of another woman — let’s be honest, it could only be a woman — taking over the day to day management of the home front seemed preposterous. I had some decent nous after years of watching Rianne, after all, and after I left Chernobyl, my homesteads were distinctly humble. My divorce apartment in Burbank was a part-furnished one bed, an anonymous four-walled hole in an anonymous cream stucco 90s block near the mall. It had just enough room to host four people around a card table for a cozy supper of Welsh rarebit and French onion soup, and just enough room for me to lie in bed at night under my Harvey Nicks duvet cover wondering if I truly deserved to be loved by Alex.

Berkeley had been another proposition. One-tenth of the size of Chernobyl, and with far fewer friends to entertain, I could clean the tiny A-frame from its wide-planked pine deck to the far corner of the mezzanine loft in under two hours to even Jocasta Cranford’s exacting standards. (Not that she’d ever see the place, but still.) Even with its twenty foot ceilings and Alex abandoning his boxers and jeans wherever they fell, 500 square feet is shockingly easy to maintain when you don’t have a proper kitchen and you live in one room.

Santa Monica was supposed to be a homecoming of sorts — well, for me, at least. When we’d toured the apartment, I saw in my mind’s eye the dinner parties we’d throw for my friends and Alex’s new work buds, tureens of coq au vin or plates of scallops en croute, delicate herb salads, vast bowls of Eton mess bursting with strawberries and cracked up meringues. Or Al’s new club football team over for Sunday morning IPAs and Bloody Marys and sticky, garlicky chicken wings to accompany a Premier League match. Cocktails for just a few couples, martinis and old-fashioneds and maybe a creamy, dreamy Grasshopper. Thanksgiving with all the de Mornays left in SoCal, my cousin Pearl manning the cocktail shaker and my dad crumbling sausage for his famous stuffing. Vegans be damned! he’d shout, as he always did, stirring even more butter into the dish.

Well, COVID put an end to those delicious schemes. The pretty sea green plates just right for nibbles and the vintage Moser glassware in palest, dusty pink hadn’t even come out of the boxes they’d arrived in. When my mom came over, we had tea in the fat white ceramic mugs that had been following me around since the Divorce Apartment, and we ate Danish butter cookies right out of the tin. High style, it was not.

“I want a party,” Jenn announced as we rounded the corner onto Wilshire from 6th Street.

As the patterns of everyday life have begun to push through the drear COVID landscape, and the purple-tier panic stations of December have been abandoned for the less alarming shade of yellow of our current state of despair, I have allowed myself to reopen the bubble I’d had with Jenn and step back inside. Asking Jenn to join me on my daily walks again was as nerve-racking as asking Kieran Jones if he’d be my valentine. Kieran had jeered the very suggestion with a shout of, “Are you retarded?” in front of my entire fourth grade classroom. I got a better reaction from Jenn, but you never can tell in these weird days.

“A party?” I asked her, trying to keep up with her much longer stride. I’d made the foolish decision to wear the new cork wedges I was trying to break in, and they were breaking me more than the other way around. “Sounds a bit premature.”

Jenn stopped to let me catch up, pausing right in front of the cake shop that I feared might be my undoing one day. I’d known it was there throughout the pandemic, but I’d never once passed over its threshold. Through the sparkling plate glass window, I caught sight of pristine white cases filled with chunky cookies and pastel macarons (my true kryptonite) and regimented row upon row of cupcakes. Vanilla and red velvet and a yellow one topped with a swirl of the most glossy chocolate frosting I’d ever seen. Some cautious voice in me warned that were I to have even one of those, I’d find frequent excuses to visit. Soon I’d be vying for a walk-on role in 1,000-Lb. Sisters, with me as the only sister. (I remember when Rachel was at her heaviest. She threw a set of scales into the pool because the red needle had pointed to 115 pounds.)

“Anything can be a party if you want it to be,” she said firmly, with the same assured tone she took when she was trying to work herself up to wear someone down.

“You should tell Al that before his next visit to the dentist. Should go down very well.”

After several days of reeking breath that couldn’t be banished with even Listerine, one of Alex’s bottom molars cracked and crumbled into his hand. He’d sat there for a while in shock, staring at the yellowy-grey enamel and dentum in his palm. “How does a person break a tooth on spaghetti, for fuck’s sake?” he’d asked of me. As it turns out, Scottish dentistry does a pretty decent job of teeing one up to have one’s tooth self-destruct under the strain of bolognese sauce.

“Ugggggh, Mel, no need to be such a fucking downer. What I mean is, we can have a party. Just you and me and Al. Tony said we could.” Jenn pressed her nose against the glass and waved to the dark-haired woman behind the counter. “Giada de Laurentiis loves this place, by the way.”

“Tony Fauci?” I said to Jenn’s back as she strolled inside.

“No, Tony the Tiger. Come on, Mel,” she clucked. “Get in here. You’re not going to gain weight by looking.”

Over the years, I’ve learned it’s better to follow a clucked order from Jenn before it becomes a bark.

I drifted towards the macarons and the tiny, spoon-sized cups of banana pudding topped with whipped cream and chopped almonds while Jenn inspected the cupcakes. “You want me to throw a party for… you.”

“For us,” she chided. “We deserve it. We played by the rules. We can get a cake and some champagne. And that country terrine you got me hooked on would be good. Oh, and you can make that thing you do with the beef and the artichokes stuffed inside. How hard is all that?”

I’d been about to order one — just one — of the pistachio macarons but I couldn’t let this pass. “Hard. For three people, doubly hard. Cooking can get more complicated the fewer mouths you have to feed, believe it or not.”

Jenn ignored me. “I think… one red velvet and one of those plain vanilla ones would be perfect, Lee,” she said to the baker. “She’ll pretend she doesn’t want it, but she’ll come around.”

“I mean, if you had said something like, I don’t know, like pappardelle with a mushroom ragoût, it might be okay.”

“Oh, and Lee? How about six of those macarons? Surprise me with the flavors.”

“And no starter. Or just some artichoke dip in a bread bowl, nothing complicated.”

I hadn’t made that in years. Though it had been my showstopper back in Bristol — no one had ever seen such a thing pulled off without it tasting too healthily of Greek yoghurt — Julian had declared it off limits once he learned the secret ingredient was a massive amount of mayo.

She turned slowly on her heel, but I couldn’t miss the smile on her face. You couldn’t miss one like that from the International Space Station. “So you’re saying yes.”

“Fuck.” You’d think after 25 years of know Jenn I’d know when I’m getting corralled in with an idea that is fully her own, but apparently not.

“Tomorrow at 8 sound good? I got you covered for booze. And while I’m here, help me choose a cake,” she directed between bites of her red velvet cupcake.

“Oh, I get to choose something about this? How magnanimous of you.”

“Nah, you get to choose another thing, too.” Jenn caught a morsel of the reddy-brown cake before it dropped to the floor.

“That triple berry cream cake looks perfect,” I volunteered, leaning over the case to marvel at the perfectly smooth white frosting topped with a mound of fresh berries. “What’s the other thing?”

“You get to choose how you want to pay for this cake.”

***

My best friend had it right: a small get-together of two households of mixed vaccination status was precisely what the doctor ordered. That it was Dr. Tony Fauci who’d placed the order made it that much more relaxing.

But I won’t lie. Hugging Jenn with my mask off was slightly terrifying until I felt her in my arms, until her familiar scent of coffee and cold roses swirled around me and drew me close. One of the greatest cruelties of life in our current plague years has been this — familiar, wanted touch, the pressure of an embrace with those so close to our hearts and yet not close enough to justify the risk of consumption by the great monster COVID’s maw. Now, I did not want to let her go, never again. If I could have crawled beneath her shirt just to feel my skin on hers, I might have. She would have immediately called me a fucking weirdo, but she might have let me do it anyway.

“Too long, Mel,” she whispered.

Alex, done fussing with bringing the dip and a clutch of champagne flutes out to the coffee table, cleared his throat behind us. “I think I might be brave enough for a hug, too,” he said with a crack in his voice. He looked like a schoolboy with his hands jammed in his pockets and his wet hair hanging in sproingy curls after his very recent shower. “If you’ll have me, that is.”

Jenn broke away from me to face my husband, hands on her slim hips. (Those cupcakes go in her mouth but not to her hips, clearly.) “Alexander Carr, do you really think I’d turn down a hug from you?”

“Dunno,” he mumbled, shifting his weight from side to side and looking firmly at the ground. The transformation into Adolescent Alex was complete. I half expected his jeans to magically transform into the ratty old mens’ trousers he wore when I met him, and his favorite Nick Drake song to burst in over the Mystic Braves I had playing in the background.

“I mean,” Jenn said, sidling up to Al, batting her lashes. “Mel did tell me once that you were the most irresistible man she’d ever met.”

“Jenn! Don’t embarrass me!” Now I was the one to feel like an adolescent mess, with my best friend telling the boy I liked better than anything in the world that I had a crush on him. Because I definitely have a crush on Alex, even now.

“Oh hush, you. You married the poor guy, obviously you’re into him. Now get over here, you asshole, and get your government-approved hug!” Jenn punctuated her order with a sharp stomp of her kitten heel on the floorboards; Alex flinched. I would have been worried it could be an erotic moment for Al if I thought he was into BDSM. (We are, like the cupcake Jenn bullied me into eating, hopelessly vanilla.)

After all the CDC-sanctioned embraces had been doled out (and documented for Instagram), Jenn and Alex commandeered the faux-Danish Modern sofa and the bread bowl of artichoke dip. I kept my distance on the old blue loveseat, more out of fear of systematically destroying the bowl on my own than of being very close to someone not wearing a mask.

“Have you ever tasted anything like this?” Alex garbled through a mouthful of dip. “Heaven.” He popped another cube of sourdough doused in sour cream and mayonnaise in his mouth and ostentatiously smacked his lips.

Jenn swirled a celery stick in the bowl. “It’s not exactly the French Laundry, but I think Newsom showed us that’s not a great look right now.”

“Can we please not talk politics?” I had had Caitlin on the phone last night and all she wanted to talk about is Matt Gaetz, how long she thought he might be going away for, and whether it would be too crass to ask Rachel what it was really like being teenage arm candy to some guy pushing 40.

“Fine,” Jenn groused, and reached her glass of champagne out towards Al for a top up. “I was warming up for the gossip. Not that you’d be interested in that.”

“Is it about anyone I know?” Alex asked, carefully tilting the bottle towards the rim of her flute before crossing the room to refresh mine. Miniscule biscuity-golden bubbles plipped towards my nose as I took a sip.

Jenn set her glass down on one of the ugly cork and copper coasters Uncle B had sent us as a wedding present. “You ready for a laugh?”

“Is it a funny haha laugh, or a bitter why does life suck so much laugh?” I quizzed.

“Probably both. And yes, Alex, it’s about someone you know.”

Al rubbed his hands in glee. “Fantastic. Carry on, Captain.”

Jenn made a fuss of fixing the drape on her black surplice top before she met my eye. “What would you say if I told you that your ex-husband is thinking about having a baby?”

Those miniscule champagne bubbles didn’t feel quite as small shooting out of my nose as they had passing over my tongue only seconds before. “WHAT?” I shrieked.

Alex, who had frozen mid-bite of a mayo-drenched chunk of bread, began to cough uncontrollably and gasp for air. Jenn administered a mighty thwack between his shoulder blades, dislodging an artichoke into the napkin she thoughtfully held out for him.

“There, there,” she cooed. I was glad someone was taking care of my husband, because it felt like I’d been superglued to the loveseat. “Here, have some more champagne, Al. Wash it down.”

“I’m going to murder my sister,” Alex rasped. “I will not be an uncle to that arsehole’s baby!”

“Settle down, Beavis,” Jenn chided, swirling her glass of bubbly and holding it up to the early evening light for inspection. “Mel, you really married a hothead, you know that?”

I felt like someone had shot lidocaine directly into my bloodstream. Even my eyeballs felt numb.

“I won’t have you defending him,” Alex stormed. He’d abandoned the dip demolition for a floorboard-wearing, long-legged pace from front door back to where Jenn perched primly on the edge of the sofa.

Jenn downed the rest of her glass. “This Taittinger is pretty decent. Can the Alpha Male Special and top me up, Al.”

“You hate the bastard! You can’t — you can’t drop that kind of bomb on Mel and me and think we’re going to be fine. This isn’t fine. It’s our fucking personal Armageddon!”

“A little hyperbolic, but okay. Top me up and I’ll tell you more. It’s not what you think.” Jenn shoved her glass towards Alex, who filled it with only a minor rumble of complaint about murdering various siblings and ex-husbands.

As it turned out, it really wasn’t anything like what Alex and I assumed she’d meant. What Jenn sketched out for us certainly wasn’t the normal state of affairs for men in their mid-30s who are supposedly loved-up and monogamous (or close enough) and in want of an heir and a spare and however many he cares, but I’ve learned that very little is likely to be normal when Julian is involved. Within minutes, I could tell this was likely to be a Three-Pipe Problem. Lacking pipes, champagne bottles would have to do. I snagged two more from the fridge and shoved them in the ice bucket.

With another glass of champagne swirling in his belly along with a small pond of mayo and sour cream, and Jenn’s promise that his sister’s gametes would be nowhere near Julian’s, Alex’s temper had downshifted from thermonuclear explosion. “Let me get this straight,” he said, running a hand through his curls. “I’m not going to be an uncle.”

Jenn shifted on the sofa next to him to grab another celery stick. “Nope, not by blood at least. At most a step-uncle if your sister decides she wants to marry him.”

“Simply avoided,” Alex replied with a smug, tight-lipped grin. “I won’t let it happen.”

“You can’t stop her,” I reminded him, even though I was nearly as wigged out as my husband at the thought of Cranford-Carr nuptials. Somehow, such a marriage struck me as even more incestuous than first cousins at the altar.

“How about we don’t go down that road,” Jenn said calmly. “The one we have is … sufficiently interesting to me.”

And to Al and me, too. While it was most certainly a cockamamie scheme, it did solve Julian’s twin problems. It’s a common enough conundrum, one I’ve seen discussed on the pages of Dear Prudence and in private Facebook chats with college classmates. What do you do when you’ve found a partner you’re convinced is “the one,” the person you’d twist your life into Gordian knots for, the mate that softens the world’s jagged edges and makes your body and mind resonate in your secret chord — but your reproductive plans don’t match?

More often than not, the answer is: move on. You will resent the other person in time for closing a door you wanted open, a door through which you saw a gurgling baby reaching its chubby arms for your embrace, or a big screen TV where that baby’s crib will be. Don’t have a child if you aren’t all in. Don’t miss out on a chance at parenthood if you are.

That Maya Angelou quote about believing people the first time when they tell you who you are is overplayed, but it doesn’t make it less true. On my very first date with Julian Cranford, he’d been emphatic about having a child.

“My plan is to get established first, of course,” he’d told me after dinner, on a slow meander back up St. Michael’s Hill to my flat. I can still feel his hand in mine, still feel the calm of his touch that October evening. “I’ve a job waiting for me at my dad’s company, but I want to make something of myself first. I want to have enough time for my child, and I can’t see that happening unless I’ve shimmied up the pole a bit.”

I told him that seemed sensible, but didn’t bother to ask about the other party contributing DNA. I’d absorbed enough “cool girl” nonsense to know there was nothing like seeming too eager — to be a girlfriend, a wife, a mother — around a man to turn him off completely. Not that after one date I was clamoring to audition for any of those roles, but I was hedging my bets, at least in terms of a second date.

As a man, such rules didn’t apply to Julian. Will teased him on the regular, called him “Super Dad” and “Daddy Dearest,” but the jokes didn’t land a blow on Jules.

“Call me old-fashioned, but if you’re going about parenthood, there should be two parents in that home,” Julian would scoff. “Too often it’s the man who won’t be responsible.”

“What about lesbians?” I remember Minty asking, but Julian was on a tear.

“Look at all those children who grow up on council estates without a dad. Without a man in their lives at all. If they’re lucky, one of their mums’ ever-changing parade of boyfriends might change a nappy. Every child deserves a father who is present and engaged.”

“When there’s two gay dads, though,” Minty mused, “one of them’s bound to be there.”

Julian did concede that point. But in retrospect, it was a rather stirring sentiment in general, even if it was deeply classist. His own father’s absence was explained away as different — Ed Cranford would have been around more, if he wasn’t busy manning capitalism’s rigging.

One of the pointiest knives Julian liked to chuck at me during our marriage was my body’s refusal to host a Cranford heir. We’d lost Baby C at 14 weeks, far enough along for Jules to have started researching which Pasadena preschool had the highest cachet, but there had been a few other blips of fertility here and there, late and heavy periods that Julian was convinced were early losses. My gynecologist thought otherwise, and prescribed birth control to “even it out.”

Not that I ever told Julian. What Julian didn’t have to know, he wouldn’t. Each month, I had my prescription refilled at a pharmacy ten miles away in Monrovia, where I paid cash over the counter and never once used our insurance. And each month I sat in a Walgreens parking lot, popping pill after pill into a dainty enamel case. I kept that little yellow case close, hiding it in the inner zippered pocket of whatever bag I was using that day. It never once sat on my vanity, never once kept its counsel at the bottom of my dresser drawer, never once made an appearance before any of my friends when I got a little drunk and thought I might take just one of them into my confidence. Even Rachel, lifelong Melissa-decoder, never sussed out this particular secret.

I only gave up the daily dose of Micronor (always taken at 5:35 a.m., five minutes after Julian left for his morning run) when I found a crumpled piece of paper marked with a smudged pink lip print and the initial “T” stashed in the inside pocket of one of Jules’ blazers I wanted Rianne to send out for dry cleaning. When I flipped the sheet over, “T” had left her number — 305 was Miami, I knew that much, where he’d been the week before. That afternoon, I took the seventeen tabs of Micronor remaining in the yellow case to my local CVS, where I surrendered them to a pharmacist.

“My husband and I are, uh, ready,” I explained to the tech, not that she’d been seeking an explanation. “And I didn’t want to flush these away.”

I came home with a couple of pregnancy tests and began Operation: Save This Marriage With a Baby. Or, as Julian knew it, Let’s Really Try. He was an enthusiastic participant, and I did a decent job at feigning I was, too.

Eight weeks later I was hunched over the cloakroom toilet, chucking up Rianne’s Chinese chicken salad and trying not to brush my agonizingly tender breasts against the porcelain bowl. Whoever she was, “T” was forgotten as soon as I showed Julian the two blue lines on a white plastic wand.

Even if my body chose to forget it might want to bring him a child, Jules’ saccharine dream of fatherhood never stopped clouding his view. After he’d moved downtown and away from me, he’d had a brief relationship with a woman he’d met through work. Miranda, who passed me most of my Julian gossip for the first, worst post-separation year, showed me pics he’d sent Will. She looked the part of a future Mrs. Cranford — tidy, tiny, with a dazzling smile and what must have been nearly a yard of perfectly beach-waved brunette hair. But that fizzled when she all she wanted was for Julian to make it rain for her, not for her to make babies for him.

If he wanted a baby, Julian chose poorly in hitching his star to the mercurial Fennella Carr. He hadn’t meant to fall in love with Fenn. Al and I both resisted that this could even be true — not that Julian was incapable of love, to be clear. We both knew Julian’s real failing was that he did love; his life would have been infinitely easier if he’d fallen into line with his father’s warnings about feeling too deeply about anything.

A long time ago, Alex had told me about a conversation he’d had with Ed Cranford. “I was spending the Easter holidays with Jules that first year at school,” he told me. “Mum didn’t have enough money for me to take the train, and taking the coach would take me over a day to get home. I spent the hols in London instead and it was Ed who put the seed of aiming for Goldmans in my head. He said I was a fine influence on Jules, that I was a far better example to his son than the last boy he’d lived with.”

“Mmmm, can we not talk about Jules?” I pleaded.

Alex and I were floating in post-coital bliss, only our second time after we’d snuck off from that disaster movie of a party at Tom Gregory’s. It was bad enough that we were in the flat Al shared with Jules — I’d had to walk past the pin-neat bedroom Julian had fucked me in only four days before. Julian filled nearly every corner of this place, oozing competence and charisma under Al’s closed bedroom door. Invoking his name just reminded me how ill-prepared I was to go public with someone new, someone not Julian.

“This is pertinent, sweetest,” Al said with a huff, crossing his arms over his tatty green duvet cover. Unlike Julian’s far more sumptuous bedclothes, this was decidedly polyester, enlivened only by extensive pilling. “Ed told me he thought Jules’ biggest failing was that his feelings ran too deep. As you might imagine, I was very interested to hear this, since early on I didn’t think he had many. Failings, that is.”

“Are you sure you met human beings before you met Julian?”

“A few. Not as many as some, I admit.”

“It does show, but I still like you.” I tweaked the end of his long nose and curled my body against his side, letting the heat of mine melt into his.

A low laugh rippled from his chest, resonating in my body, too. “Why did no one warn me you were this cheeky?”

“You could have asked Julian what my biggest failing is.”

“Would he have told me that? I don’t think so, sweetest. He thought you were perfect, or near enough. You know what he called you once? Transcendent. I was impressed he knew what it meant. Normally he called you ‘top totty’ in front of Will and Tom.”

“Remind me why we’re talking about him again?” I recall trailing a finger through the light scruff of black curls on Alex’s chest, drawing X’s and O’s. “We could, y’know, take advantage of him not being here a little more.”

Alex turned on his side to face me and looked at me, in me it almost felt like. Like he was feeling about to see if I had any of the same little black cloud that trailed him daily. “He loves us both. If this, you and me, is going to ever see the light of day, you know we’ll break his heart, twice over.”

I didn’t reply. Julian’s ghost had no right to tread over the threshold; I hadn’t invited him in this room, but Alex had summoned him anyway.

In the end, Alex had made the choice for us all in letting me go. He and I could let our hearts be broken — they’d been nicked and scratched and clobbered enough. Veterans, the both of us. Jules was green and fresh. Better that one of us be saved than all three of us damned. It would only stave off the inevitable, in the end. By the time he’d let Fenn in, Julian’s own heart was nearly as corded with scars as mine.

Fenn was a bad choice for Julian in more ways than I have little black dresses in my wardrobe. “The heart wants what it wants,” Julian told me after Fenn had flown back to Scotland this past December. “I’ve wanted her for 20 years.”

“Christ, you sound like a shitty romance novel, Jules.” It was bad enough I was wasting my afternoon talking on the phone to my ex-husband for want of much else to do, but to hear him wax rhapsodic over the woman he pined for throughout our marriage was a bit much, even for a committed relationship masochist like me.

“Well, it’s true,” Jules sulked. “Maybe I used to think I wanted her only because I couldn’t have her, but now I know having her only makes me want her more.”

“Good for you,” I grumbled, and kept scrolling through my immigration forum, spoiling for a fight in the politics subforum. I’d been fighting about masks for nine months with middle aged men married to Russian women to no resolution at all, but I couldn’t stay away from the awful place. “But she’s not going to move here.”

“Plenty of couples are binational. My parents have a highly successful marriage, and they haven’t even seen each other in 18 months because of COVID.”

I had to bite the inside of my mouth to keep from laughing. The Cranfords were so successful at staying married precisely because they never had to see each other. Not that they might recognize each other now. Jules’ sister Annabelle had told me her parents had morphed almost beyond recognition during their pandemic-imposed separation. Ed Cranford had made a splashy donation to a homeless shelter in Liverpool, speaking out for the first time on his experience as a teenage rough sleeper in that city and garnering fawning press attention. Birthday honours didn’t seem out of the question in 2022, if the Daily Mail was correct. And according to Annabelle, Jocasta was in training to become a yogini and considering opening a very exclusive studio in Newport Beach. The pandemic really has turned the world upside down.

But there was another hurdle to Julian achieving domestic ecstasy. “I don’t know Fenn’s all in on the whole baby thing though,” I said carefully. “I don’t think it’s a baby with you. In general.”

“We can make it work. And I can be very persuasive, as you know.”

Julian punctuated this thought with a nasty little chuckle which made me gag. Being reminded that one’s ex maintains an active sex life with one’s sister-in-law is nearly as pleasant as my annual pap smear, at which I have to invariably remind the gyno that despite my age and level of sexual activity, I need the extra small speculum, please, only to get ignored. Again.

According to Jenn, however, Alex had made a number of assumptions about Julian’s reproductive modus operandi that were far too conventional. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Al, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. At least when it comes to your wife’s ex-husband and his Baby Quest.”

I’ll cut to the chase. Or Jenn’s version of the chase, filtered through mayo-heavy artichoke dip and Taittinger.

Just two days before —

“Wait, why are we only learning about this now?” I butted in before Jenn could really start.

Jenn clucked her tongue at me. “As you may recall, I am pretty fastidious about my ethical duties as a lawyer. One of them is the duty of confidentiality. And I wasn’t completely sure if they weren’t prospective clients for a hot minute, so excuse me.”

After Jenn assured me no state bar line had been crossed, she dove back in. Two days before, she’d started settling back into her “real” office in a low-slung brick building off Lincoln. With two doses of Moderna some six weeks behind her, a closing door with a lock, and the managing partner the only other person in the office every day, she’d felt safe enough to move the Jenn Lodge Law Juggernaut the whole five blocks from her second bedroom.

“I’m not going to see anyone if I don’t want to. It’s not like we do walk-ins, anyway. We’re not exactly 1-800-EZ-DIVORCE here.” She flicked an invisible fleck of dust off her shoulder.

I know; I’ve seen her hourly rate which would make my dad blush, and then wonder if he fucked up going into business law in the Valley.

Not that the first call of the day in her new-old office had anything to do with divorce. Well, it sort of did, in that the question came out of two people’s separate and finalized divorces. Kayla Salcedo had shucked off the “Mackenzie” from her last name as soon as a judge signed off on her split from Mack in February. From Kayla’s Instagram confessionals, the entire process sounded like a GOOP-addled dream, filled with phrases like “collaborative uncoupling” and “positive division” and an insufferable number of quotes from Rumi (“I mean, like, ‘Listen to the reed and the tale it tells, / How it sings of separation’ is totally about what Mack and I are going through”).

At Julian’s urging and with a little bit of his capital, Kayla had launched a line of silk and satin loungewear during the pandemic. The timing could not have been better. Kayla’s brand, La Reina, was unabashedly marketed to women who suddenly had no office to go to and a little more cash in their pockets, with salons and day spas and Botox clinics closed for months on end. Jen sent me one of Kayla’s washable silk robes as an early birthday present and I’m finding every excuse to throw it on. Buttery smooth, the pinky-peach of a Malibu sunset and piped in a blood-dark maroon, it is aggressively feminine and in far better taste than I would have expected from the former Mrs. Mackenzie.

It’s no guess who was behind Kayla’s sudden veer into affordable, slightly restrained elegance. Throughout the COVID summer of 2020, Jules had remained a regular sight on Kayla’s Instagram posts, each shot perfectly staged in blown out, super-saturated faux-Kodachrome. Kayla in hot pink Lilly Pulitzer and saucer-sized Fendi sunglasses, celebrating the Queen’s birthday on the balcony of Julian’s 31st floor apartment, clinking high-balls of Pimms with Jules in rumpled linen. Jules, his hair slicked back and looking much like a 21st century Patrick Bateman in the Plague Year, rocking an ultra-sharp pinstripe suit and nursing a martini the size of a punchbowl. Kayla in vintage Pucci; Julian in brand new bespoke Henry Poole purchased right before flying to the UK became an unattractive option.

When he’d come up with the hashtag #coronabesties back in May of last year, it had been a throwaway, a little ribbing on his part of Kayla, who spoke like the pop! of a bottle of $12 pink champagne, or an anthropomorphized Lisa Frank school binder. When the hashtag took off on Instagram and Twitter in July, Kayla already had a hundred or so posts on her post-divorce glow up, and learning how to upgrade her style without losing sight of who she is. She and the hashtag were in the right place at the right time — in her photos and Instagram stories, she shared tips on how to “luxify” (her word) your new stay-at-home life when few, if any, other people were seeing you on a daily basis.

I’d written Kayla off as the Girl Most Likely to Think Erik Satie Is a Thai Appetizer, but in retrospect much of that came from her being the other woman in Mack’s first marriage to Jen. Making her out to be fatuous and vain suited me more than reality. She’d been unfailingly, irritatingly polite and cheery, even around Jenn, who regularly “oopsy-daisy”-ed a pointy elbow into Kayla’s ribs. It wasn’t Mack who wanted season tickets to the opera or saw “difficult” ballets in tiny spaces downtown. And yes, she had many opinions on which iteration of Real Housewives was the best (“RHONY or die!!!!!”), but she’d graduated with honors from Syracuse. She may have been basic, but much like her TV-wife Staasi from Vanderpump Rules, she’d embraced the slur and wanted to see where she could take it.

Instagram was made for basic bitches like Kayla, especially those in the process of emerging from their pupal cocoon of pumpkin spice, Uggs, #ootd and Kylie lip kits into their final form as Stylemakers. On the back of #coronabesties, her 5,000 IG followers, and an undisclosed slice of equity handed over to Julian for his cash and contacts in the Far East, she launched La Reina in January. The brand is affordable luxury (well, affordable if you don’t think $150 for a pair of silk shortie pajamas in the perfect cloud grey with the words “Best Bitch” embroidered in gold script is too much), and a complete money pit until the gears of the world creak back into their usual bumping hum.

Even Jenn is a fan of the La Reina bronze sleeping shift Mack nagged her to buy in a show of support, though she reserves the right to detest Kayla. “When she called me, I figured she wanted a referral to a real estate lawyer, someone who can help her lease retail space. Seriously Mel, this was the fucking first phone call I get back in my real office and it’s her, asking me if I could give her a referral to a lawyer with experience in navigating platonic co-parenting situations. I nearly spat my shitty Keurig coffee in my keyboard.”

“The fuck is a ‘platonic co-parenting situation’?” Alex sighed. “Also, I happen to like my Keurig.”

“Mel, do you hide your husband under a slab in a dungeon? It’s when two friends who aren’t fucking or even romantically interested in each other decide to have a baby. Also, aren’t we supposed to be eating pasta tonight? Why the fuck did I agree to all these carbs?”

With a groan, and on slightly unsteady feet, I woozied my way to the kitchen to fill the stockpot with water for the pappardelle. I’d already prepped the shiitake and porcini ragoût earlier that morning, sweating thinly sliced rounds of sweet pink shallots and finely diced garlic in a Staub dutch oven before adding the sliced mushrooms, sauv blanc and sage. It was a recipe I’d made up years ago when Rianne had a night off and Julian had invited the Geddeses over with only an hour’s notice to the replacement chef (i.e., me). It had been enough of a hit that it went permanently into Rianne’s rotation the following week.

Over the low wall that divided the kitchen from the living room, Jenn was patiently explaining to Al what happens when a man doesn’t love a woman that way but really, really wants a child with someone he knows. “I mean, I get it. Someone like Julian wants a woman he trusts, no genetic question marks looming over an unknown egg donor to fuck up his spawn. I don’t handle this stuff myself, but I hear things all the time about sperm donors who weren’t really Stanford Ph.D’s or Harvard Law grads, or the egg donor comes from a long line of people with mental illness but promised there wasn’t a limb out of place on her family tree.”

I stopped mid-transfer of the ragoût to a small cocotte for re-warming, my wooden spoon sliding out of my hand to clatter on the floor. “Ju-Julian is having a baby with… Kayla?”

“Fuck me,” Alex whispered. When I looked up at him, he’d gone a pale green tint. “I thought I’d be happy when he cheated on Fenn, but I… Fuck. Fuck!”

Jenn wagged a finger at him, right after she sucked an errant glob of dip off it. “Stop being such a goddamn hothead and keep your shirt on. Kayla said there’s absolutely no sex happening. Whatever your sister and your wife might think about Julian, she doesn’t get it. She said he’s a good looking man but he’s not her type. Too small, she said, and when I asked her how she would know, she said, and I quote, ‘Ew! Stop being gross. I’ve never seen it. I mean big like Mack. Big everywhere.'”

“Ew!” I gagged. I’d mentally fashioned both of my male best friends into Ken dolls some time around the sixth grade; I really didn’t need to think about Jeffrey Mackenzie’s penis. Ever.

Alex snorted. “You only like them big in the right places, sweetest?”

“Ew!” Jenn shouted and administered a soft whack to Alex’s knee. “I do not need to think about the size of your dick, Mack’s dick, that shithead Julian Cranford’s dick or anyone’s dick at the moment.”

“Not until you rejoin Tinder,” I mumbled, and was grateful she couldn’t hear me over the zhush of my electric pepper mill.

“My apologies for offending your ever-delicate sensibilities,” Alex chortled. “So, how does this work? Jules wanks into some Baccarat crystal tumbler and Kayla pops the spunk inside her with a gold plated turkey baster?”

“That’s one way. But I don’t think Julian is going to leave something as crucial as insemination to chance if he’s not the one putting it inside, do you?”

It didn’t even work out when he was the one very much in charge putting it inside me, but I said nothing and kept stirring the mushrooms.

“Of course,” Alex said with a grunt. “Must make sure the precious Cranford sperm takes hold this time, so I expect some tricked out Beverly Hills fertility clinic.”

“Now that I do not know. As I said, she’s not a client. But I thought twice about telling both of you all this because I wasn’t sure what you’d think.”

“It’s not like we wouldn’t have learned soon enough,” Alex sneered, pushing himself off the sofa to join me in the kitchen. “I expect I’ll have my sister on the phone, wailing about Julian breaking her heart. Selfish prick. He isn’t even giving her the chance to make up her own bloody mind about whether she wants a baby.”

To my right, Alex was tending to the task of grating parmesan I’d set him with terrifyingly aggressive vigor, but I couldn’t help but ask. “Isn’t this a good outcome though? I thought Jules and Fenn having a baby was supposed to be our personal Armageddon.”

He paused in his zealous annihilation of the cheese to flick his gaze towards me. “Please don’t correct me when I’m wallowing in this moment of righteous indignation.”

“Sorry, Al,” I said, and reached to give the hand propping up the mangled cheese a light squeeze of apology. “I know that’s your favorite flavor of indignation.”

“Forever the most delectable, sweetest,” he replied, bending over to nuzzle the crown of my head.

With a cluck of her tongue, Jenn peeled herself from the sofa to crowd us in the kitchen. “Get a room, you two.”

“We did have one until you barged in here,” Al pointed out while I drained the pappardelle in a grand plume of steam. “Rather a hot and steamy one, too.”

“Ew.”

It seemed to be rather the word of the day.

***

Yesterday was my 36th birthday, and birthdays seem as good a time as any to take stock of what came before and to glimpse at what’s to come, if one can scry it in the distance.

Our nearly 15 months at home are coming to an end, with the country unfurling its tightly wound petals in delicate blooms to those of us who have taken our medicine. Alex is set to return to the office three days a week in mid-June, but before then we’re travelling to Albuquerque for the wedding of one of his colleagues. It’s been so long since we had a road trip — the last was our move from Berkeley, which seems a lifetime ago. Back then, COVID seemed like something we could contain on returning cruise ships, or so Trump would have had us believe.

And me? I’m going back to school. Well, sort of. After two years and one day of scribbling away here, unravelling my past to understand why I am how I am in torrents of words, I pulled the ripcord and signed up for a writing class at last. I fully mean to write that story of Kitty and Duncan Carr, but even after hundreds of thousands of words here, I do not know how to begin. I swear it’s a cracking tale, and I intend to do it justice.

But to do it justice, I must be more judicious in pruning and crafting and spinning out and winding back in all the words that course and fizz and zip around my brain. I must learn how to put up a gate, and when to open it, and to whom.

Josh always called me his little Scheherazade, born with some infant sense of plot and dialogue, but in great need of discipline. Discipline at his hand was brutal; he nearly killed the Scheherazade within for good by stopping up her tongue for so many years. But now I control the path, now I set the poles.

As Josh once said, writing is a discipline, as well as being disciplining to the writer. So discipline it shall be, and by my own hand, through my own hand for once.